It Takes One to Know One
by Meredith Bronwen Mallory
Summary: TOMOYO/SAKURA: Tomoyo attempts to take her own life, and finds herself stopped by a most unexpected savior.


AUTHOR'S NOTES: First of all, thank you so much for taking the time to read this. I'm so very glad you bothered! This is my second shoujo ai fic. That sounds terribly official, doesn't it? ^_^ I'm hoping to keep this under three chapters, considering how many *other* fics I have going. Please send feedback if you're so inclined!

This isn't as dark as 'Conjure Me', and hopefully there's a little humor in it as well. I can't resist the temptation to play with Tomoyo's head. *angelic*

I hope you enjoy!

-Meredith

Disclaimer: This fic features two women in love. L-O-V-E. ^_~ If you have a problem with this, please evolve, or at least get out of this fic. Any and all flames will be summarily laughed at and used to line the gerbil cage. Remember, bigotry is not a family value. If you're not allergic to the aforementioned topic (even the gerbil ^_~), then welcome!

Rating is PG-13. Light kissing, ect.

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It Takes One to Know One 1/?

by Meredith Bronwen Mallory

http://www.demando.net/

mallorys-girl@cinci.rr.com

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She had never held another girl before; and though she had known what to expect, the reality of blood fleeing Tomoyo's lithe form was so terrifying she nearly fell to her knees. Gently, she cradled the young school girl close to where her heart beat frantically, moving her arm to support Tomoyo's knees. Now, stumbling backwards, and she pressed her back against the side of the foot bridge, which was chill with soul of winter. Tomoyo's eyes were wide and vivid against her pale skin, before they vanished behind twin fanned lashes and the heiress' body went completely limp.

"Two hundred six and still a lady-killer," remarked a deep voice, filled with morbid humor. Snow flakes caught in fur the color of the sun, and melted as if the locks were what their shade suggested.

"Kero!" the woman scolded, the flash in her emerald eyes visible even through the heavy fall of snow. The white masses moved like waves in the wind, lapping even so high as her thighs. She held Tomoyo high over the winter ocean, as one protects holy, precious things.

"I'm sorry," the Seal Beast remarked, the rumble in his throat sincere. "It's just, there's so much blood. I never saw her body, so never really hit me that she was dead. Even after all this time."

Oh, but *she* had seen Tomoyo dead, and white and in the coffin and damn it they put her in the ground. Tomoyo's body, just a husk, an empty thing that was blasphemy because it dare to look like the beautiful girl without actually being her. There had been no blood, then-- the morticians cleaned it up-- only the garish, red lines on the corpse's wrists, and the silver bracelets placed there to hide them. Nothing could be done about her lips-- pale blue from hypothermia, even through the pink lp gloss.

"She's not going to die," his mistress replied firmly, "I won't allow even Tomoyo to hurt herself."

"Do you need help, Sakura-sama?" this from another voice, high and silvery like the the moon on an autumn afternoon. Yue's pale eyes were narrowed and focused, he held his wings aloft over his two companions, shielding them.. 

"Iie, but thank you. We need to get her inside. Let's go," within the young woman's face, there was a brief flash, like a ghost's photograph, of a younger, more carefree Sakura. Then, the snow dove in drifts of suicidal faeries, and the bridge was empty as if no one had ever been.

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To err is human.

To really screw up is even more human than that.

She looked about twenty six, this Sakura; her mouth hovered in a coral crescent forever between a smile and a frown, and if she let you look really close, you could see that there was something written and obscured by the jungle in her eyes. She was tall, this Sakura, and she carried herself like she knew where she was going, even when she didn't. Her years numbered two hundred and six; and so many of those years had been wandering, looking, wanting so badly for something that was gone.

Eden wasn't paradise until we lost it, after all. 

############################

Tomoyo had planned her suicide. Not the when, but the 'where' and the 'how' and the 'fate-of-my-body', since the 'why' had been laid down years ago by a glorious Sakura-smile and the realization that she could never speak what was in her heart. The 'when' was the theta, the renegade variable that she teased and prodded herself with; 'when' didn't matter, because she was almost always ready to die. In the bottom drawer of her dresser, she kept the dress she planned to wear, the ribbons she'd use in her long tresses, and expensive, pearl-handled letter-opener that was going to do the trick. She was Cinderella, and the ball was waiting on her. 

She stayed because she wanted to be by Sakura's side until someone else came to take her place. Then; just fade to black. Maybe she was a little scared, and maybe she thought herself a coward for wanting to take that way out, but certainty in death allowed her to live.

Yesterday, at nineteen, When had come to her with wide open arms, whispering that her mother was away and Sakura engaged and... and she had known it was time. 

She had been sleeping in such a way that, while under the spell of Morpheus, she could sense and hear and feel the world around her, but she was trapped in her ivory bones. Now the voices seemed to blur and then focus. Dark wings fluttered before her eyes until the abstract angles and colors of the world came into view. She couldn't even be bothered to wonder why she wasn't dead-- there was something inside her so sensitized to the other girl that she sensed her beloved's presence almost immediately.

"Do you..." began a voice that sounded like wind chimes in a summer house filled with the scent of one's lover. Under Tomoyo's blue silver gaze, the older woman pressed her lips together, and her green eyes said things to Tomoyo that were just too good to be true. "You do realize this is the first chance I've had to talk to you in one hundred eighty seven years? Hoee..." she looked down at her feet, "What I am I supposed to say?"

"Sakura," Tomoyo breathed; taking in the matured vision of her beautiful best friend. Her hair, done up in her habitual style, was a little longer and a little darker. Even in the plain cream sweater and black pants that graced the older woman's lithe form, Tomoyo could sense the barely contained power of the Cardmistress. "Sakura," she began again, some how understanding that this woman had been so changed by her experiences that she was not quite (and only not quite) her childhood friend, "-sama," she decided firmly. The situation may have been strange, but she accepted Sakura instantly.

"You can call me Kinomoto-sensei, if it's easier," Sakura offered. 

"That makes me think of your father," Tomoyo protested weakly. For the first time, her eyes moved to the rest f her surroundings. Just her room at home, with the curtains drawn partially so she could still see the snow drifting down like lazy flower petals. The lights were on, bright and somehow tangible; the quilts gathered about her form and Sakura's tender gaze made her body momentarily forget the chill of being unrequited. 

"Kinomoto-kun," Tomoyo tried, blushing just a little, "I have always thought Sakura-chan would make a cute '-kun'. Li-kun should have addressed her as such, in the beginning, since they are both magical people."

Kinomoto-kun seemed to darken at the mention of the Chinese boy, but she laughed, "I'd never thought of that."

"Of course, That Brat doesn't have an once of respect in his body," pipped a familiar, high Osakan voice.

"Kero-chan!" Tomoyo giggled, taken by surprise as the small, winged creature dove into her hair. 

"It's nice to see you again, Tomoyo-san," Kero said cheerfully. He hovered near her for a moment, before darting back to the table situated on the other side of the room. Tomoyo could see Yue had installed his rather elegant form on the couch, and she nodded in greeting. Her eyes, however, soon sought the blinding glory of Kinomoto-kun-- she was everything Tomoyo had known Sakura would grow up to be and more. 

"Do you think you can eat something?" Kinomoto-kun asked, taking a seat on the bed and offering Tomoyo a tray of hot soup and warm bread. "I really think you should but, if you're too weak, you might not keep it down."

"I am a little hungry," the heiress accepted the tray, enchanted by all the new details and movements of the Cardmistress' future form. "Arigato, Kinomoto-kun!"

"Tomoyo..." Kinomoto-kun's voice was tender as it moved over the world, like silk pressed against Tomoyo's skin. 

"Hai?" Tomoyo let the spoon rest against the side of the bowl, gazing on the sorceress with concern, "Is something wrong? I want to help Kinomoto-kun, if I can."

"Damn it!" the Cardmistress said suddenly, taking Tomoyo's hands gently in her own and cradling them like baby birds, "You always do this. You do everything for me and nothing for yourself."

"I want Sakura-chan to be happy," the heiress emphasized, as if that explained everything. She looked down at her hands, feeling out-of-sorts without a camera to see the world through.

"Well, I'm not," Kinomoto-kun's tone was firm as she ran a dainty finger over the bandages on the younger girl's wrist. "I'm not happy, because the person I love left me."

"Li-kun?" Tomoyo was scandalized. There was a sudden guilt inside her, swinging like a pendulum, because she had not chosen the correct person for her Sakura.

Kinomoto-kun leaned in close, until their foreheads touched, "No, Tomoyo. Watashi wa Tomoyo ga daisuki desu. Aishiteru."

"Watashi ka?" there was a fluttering of live flowers in Tomoyo's rib cage, as if everything she'd ever known had been drained from her body. "But Sakura-chan is going to marry Li-kun and live happily in Hong Kong."

"Correction," Kinomoto-kun said dryly, " 'Sakura-chan'," she referenced her younger self with some malice, "was engaged to marry Li-kun, when her best friend Tomoyo cut her wrists and, for good measure, drowned herself in the middle of winter. Sakura-chan was-- and still is-- in love with Tomoyo," Kinomoto-kun's eyes were all emerald fire, and Tomoyo could not look away, "but, all her life Sakura-chan had thought that boys went with girls and so on. She was too stupid to understand how she felt, and too dense to see the truth even when her best friend put it right in front of her. So, when Tomoyo died, the world wasn't the same any more, and everything she touched was like in the fairy tale-- it seemed to turn to glass and cut her."

"I wasn't trying to hurt you," Tomoyo linked her arms around the sorceress, but Kinomoto-kun could only see the time before. She rested her cheek against the heiress' soft lavender hair and stared without seeing into the snow night beyond the window.

"So Sakura-chan broke off her engagement," she continued, "She went to college and pretended to be a person. She majored in archeology, since it made a good excuse, and studied magic in Tibet. She lived so long that every day was a nightmare, and she worked ten years to perfect a Card and a spell that would help her change her mistakes." Small tears gathered in the corners of the sorceress' eyes.

"It hurts me to see you cry," Tomoyo said honestly, taking up a quilt to ease the sadness seeping from Kinomoto-kun's eyes. Kinomoto-kun's arms tighted around her suddenly, and Tomoyo was suffused with a feeling of wings folded at her back as the other woman rocked her gently. 

"You're real... It hurts me to think I never... I didn't...," Kinomoto-kun took a deep breath, "Why did you give so much to me, when I never gave anything back?"

"Sakura-chan has always given to me!"

"But not the way you wanted," it was a shrewd point; and for the first time, Tomoyo felt the dream-like quality vanish from the situation. No dream or vision would have shown her this. 

"No..." she admitted softly, "But I didn't have a right to want those things."

"Of course you do!" for a moment, just a moment, Kinomoto-kun and Sakura-chan were the same. "Everyone has a right to love!" Gently, the sorceress brushed the twilight locks away from Tomoyo's face. Then, to break the growing intensity, "Your food is getting cold."

"Hai, Kinomoto-kun," Tomoyo obediently took back to sipping her soup, glad when Kinomoto-kun didn't get up. Instead, the older woman watched her with careful attention, playing absently with the slighly curling ends of the younger girl's hair. "Are you sure you couldn't have been happy with Li-kun?" 

"You don't believe me, do you?" Kinomoto-kun shook her head roughly, "Did you know that I used to sit with him in the darkened movie theater and wonder if there was something wrong with me because all I wanted to do was go home and call you? That he practically had to bribe me to kiss him? When he first said he liked me, I was just excited that *someone* did, since I thought I had never felt anything. I always got 'hayaaan' when I was with you, but I was with you all the time, so I didn't notice."

"Sakura...," the sound breezed past Tomoyo's lips, and she so wished she could see the same look in her friend's wide pools of green. Coming from this slightly different Sakura, it didn't seem real.

"It doesn't matter if you still don't believe me," Kinomoto-kun smiled sadly, tracing lightly down the slope of Tomoyo's nose, "I'm going to change the past. I wonder how many times Clow did the same, trying to get things right?"

"Three, if I remember correctly," Kero put in. He'd managed to pilfer a large cake from the Daidouji kitchen and, after lugging his prize upstairs, was taking a bath in it as Yue looked on with vague disapproval. 

"Kero-chan!" Kinomoto-kun scolded, "I put servants to sleep! What will happen when the cook wakes up and finds her cake gone?"

"I'm not worried," an icing-coated Kero sang, making a flying nose-dive into the cake, "My wonderful Mistress will get me out of this mess, and I haven't had a Daidouji cake in almost two bloody centuries!" 

"Of course, your 'wonderful mistress' will save you," Kinomoto-kun rolled her eyes with good nature.

"There's another cake in the back of the freezer, if you want it," Tomoyo offered, smiling at the sudden chorus of 'wai!!" that struck up from the other side of the room. Kero offered a paw-full of cake to the winged young man by his side.

"I hate food," Yue sniffed, "But thank you all the same, Tomoyo-san." 

"Isn't there some place you two can go? It's big house," Kinomoto-kun raised an eyebrow, only half-teasing.

"Hey," Yue pointed out with trace of his own brand of humor, "Someone has to protect Tomoyo's virtue from certain amorous sorceress."

"Yue, what a thing to say!" Kinomoto-kun turned pink, "HOOOOEEE!"

Added Kero, from somewhere in the mound of cake, "And keep you from doing any permanent damage to your younger form."

"Chaperones," Kinomoto-kun sighed. The two women blushed and looked at their hands.

Having finished her meal, the young heiress set the tray on her nightstand, studying Kinomoto-kun with wise, moon-shine eyes. "Change the past..." she murmured.

"I really didn't know if I could do it," Kinomoto-kun replied, in answer to the question Tomoyo hadn't asked. "But... after I found you on..," her profile turned down, locks of auburn hair obscuring her features, "maybe I shouldn't talk about this." Tomoyo's soft touch on her shoulder seemed to bring the words out; "I looked, to see if you'd been reborn. All my research in Hong Kong and Tibet suggested a great chance of failure in time-travel, so that was my other hope. When the cards found your new form, I was elated. You were thirteen, living on the colony on Europa. That's why it took me so long to find you."

"Europa..." Tomoyo murmured, "It's an ocean moon, ne? Very cold?" Her body seemed to tense with the memory of the lake and her attempt to meet death.

"Hai," Kinomoto-kun tipped her head back, staring at the ceiling, "You were in training to dive for the gin-pearls that grow under the icebergs. But all accounts, you were happy-- designed clothes for your classmates, sang, worked hard in school. I told myself I just wanted to see if you were really alright. I was being selfish..."

Breathless, "What happened?"

"I happened," Kinomoto-kun laughed bitterly. "I arranged a meeting with you easily enough-- I offered to sponsor the school you attended. And there you were-- your hair was short, but it was you and... I'm a really selfish person, Tomoyo." Gently, Tomoyo eased the older woman's grip on her hands, moving so that Kinomoto-kun could rest her head in the heiress' lap. 

"You're not selfish," Tomoyo murmured, fascinated by the play of light in the gold-yellow-topaz-all-over-autumn of Kinomoto-kun's hair. 

"I am, because I was so happy to see you, and I promised to help you go to a good conservatory, cultivate your voice. I felt betrayed that you didn't recognize me, but I didn't let you see that. I just wanted to be near you again. Then, when business called me back to Earth-- That is, when I called to check on you, you'd done it again!"

"Death," Tomoyo may or may not have murmured. And, with sudden understanding, "She loved you and thought she was... was wrong."

"All because I was so stupid as to come back into your life again." Kinomoto-kun raised her head, eyes filled with the same desperate affection Tomoyo hid within herself. "I have to change that. all of this."

"You have," Tomoyo pointed out.

"Not enough. I can't just say, 'Don't give into the sadness, Tomoyo' and then expect you to wait around for me to figure things out. I thought I might just vanish after I rescued you, but obviously I haven't changed all that much."

"I won't leave," it was a breathless promise, "I would never hurt Sakura-chan."

"But, see, you'll only be doing it out of obligation-- you'll still be miserable."

"I don't see how--"

"Wait." Kinomoto-kun's lips turned up in an almost smile, "listen." Downstairs, the clicking of the front-door latch echoed, and Tomoyo heard the faint callings of *her* Sakura. She started to trill out a happy reply, but the sorceress at her side raised a single finger, motioning for silence. Sakura's calls came closer and rose to a level of fear-- the sound of hurried footsteps vibrated down the hall and then.

A happy, pixie-ish face, and a voice slightly out of breath, "Tomoyo-chan! I was worried..."

With smile of pity and a little self-loathing, Kinomoto-kun said; 

"Okari. I've been waiting for you, Sakura-san."

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TO BE CONTINUED

There once was a lady named Mere,

Who was madder than a March Hare,

She did love to write,

deep into the night,

and feedback made her so happy she walked upon air!


End file.
